1998

New York City has preserved more of the classic Bishop Crook lampposts than any other of the cast-iron designs. In fact, the city has been busy since the 1980s bringing…

  This sign, one of two located on the mezzanine of the IRT East 149th Street Station where the 2,4 and 5 lines meet, points the way to the New York…

Before Hollywood became the center of the motion picture industry in the 1920s, New York City boasted several studios that produced silent motion pictures. At left we see a scene from Vitagraph…

Signs on subway platforms sometimes have a way of preserving for posterity the former names of streets under which they ran, or former names of station stops. This is especially true…

Every year, the New York City Transit Museum trots out a vintage subway train from the golden era of transit and takes it for a three-hour spin along the subways and elevateds…

NYC stoplight design has pretty much been stuck in neutral since the 1960s, when cylindrical posts holding three-light stoplights as well as WALK/DONT WALK signs first appeared on street corners,…

Ads for this children’s stomach remedy can be found all over the five boroughs. Most date back to the Teens or Twenties. Charles H. Fletcher began selling his Castoria, a mild…

Ads for the upscale East Side store painted 80 years ago are still good today! Picture is from New York Then and Now, © 1976 Dover Publications In decades past,…

Appearing to be a hybrid of the bishop’s crooks and long-armed poles, these distinctive lamps originally found a home on Seventh Avenue, though today they’re generally used for decorative effect…

In 1998, a demolition in Duffy Square allowed an ancient (ca. 1880) advertisement for horse and buggy carriages to come to light in the now-high tech, Disneyfied area. In 1998,…

Once the mainstay of multilane boulevards in the pre-expressway era, cast-iron twinlamps once decorated highways like the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and Queens Boulevard and Horace Harding Boulevard in…

Next time you are taking the Times Square Shuttle toward Grand Central, walk toward the northern end of the platform. You’ll find a locked door with the word “Knickerbocker” above it.…